As usual take anything I say about engineering with a 20-year-old grain of salt, but on the other hand I’ve worked professionally with web-based platforms for games and it has the huge downside of usually-terrible-interfaces and user experiences by comparison with applications. And the two things it does best: (1) allowing hundreds/thousands/millions to play in the same game at the same time and (2) allowing the rules of the game to change and evolve from day to day, really don’t apply to the 2-, 3-, and 4-8 player boardgames that we do here. So Java I can work with, C++ I can work with, C# I can work with, but web-based doesn’t sound like a good fit for these games.
The “bus factor” isn’t going to matter for now unless the bus actually hits. What you can see affecting Vassal right now is more what I’d call a pipeline problem – enough things are currently bottlenecked with Joel that he’s both constantly backlogged and has to push back stuff he’d rather be working on. But the solutions, if they exist, are basically the same ones Yan describes.
Since I’m at heart a designer, in this case of interfaces, modules, and features, I want the usual thing that designers and designer/programmers want on a team which is to be able to keep building a steady stream of new stuff. To the extent I get to weigh in with any suggestions about it, I’m just desperately hoping that Vassal 3 cleanups/small-improvements won’t have to come to a halt for the “let’s call it a year” that it will surely take to get a Vassal 4 engine to where it would make a meaningful difference to the games I do modules for.
I believe all the work I’ve been contributing to VASL for 3.3 compatibility is finished, as of last night. (At least, there aren’t any issues anyone has brought up that I haven’t solved…)
That should free up some time for tending to everything else.
As to Freeciv, it is nice for what it does but has a big weakness - you cannot play it offline. VASSAL can be played offline and for those of us who have to travel a lot that is a godsend.
Is this a good thread to fork into user experiences with Big Sur?
I usually wait at least a week before installing any new major macOS upgrades, but I find this one more compelling than I do most (at least recently).
I’m more than 100 turns into an Axis Empires game and don’t want to do anything that will break the module. If people face challenges after installing Big Sur I’d really like to hear about it.
Perhaps obviously, I’m not running Apple Silicon, but my hardware is relatively new.
I’m not sure that anyone will be able to answer you definitively, so I would be cautious. There was at least one report of a problem installing Vassal on Big Sur beta a few weeks ago. I am not sure how that resolved. Anyway, I will be trying it on a spare machine first.
Seems to be working fine on 27" iMacs. Tentatively the only issue identified was on a smaller screen, and that seems to be resolved by changing a display preference.